Reach inside
myself.
Discard this outer shell!
It’s been marching like a corpse,
following the circus train.
I missed my stop.
Stop trying to be who I am not.
Paper mache layers,
apply another coat of paint.
No one will notice I’m not real anymore.
Some like it this way.
The glue around my mouth
gets tighter as it dries.
They like it when I can’t speak.
If I shut my mouth,
I don’t have to lie to fit in.
Glue it completely shut,
so I don’t have to coat shit
in gold paint and call it precious.
I haven’t felt valuable since
I stopped laying down in puddles
for people just to step over me and keep walking.
I knew when they stopped looking back,
I would never be their Eurydice.
No one would soothe the underworld with song to free me,
if I could not provide them with all the instruments.
About the Creator
Josey Pickering
Autistic, non-binary, queer horror nerd with a lot to say.
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At the Sheltering Doors
The doors, they always scrambled for the doors first. When they arrive and always by night it was a race to desperately bar the creatures entry to the house in the slow crawl of numb feet that the dream would impose upon him. He never seemed fast enough and the creatures uninhibited by the same constraints always made the doors first. The houses in his dream-scapes vary night to night - Some are mansions, others shacks and some are distorted contortions of his childhood home which burned down when he was ten. But the doors are always the same – frail, loose hinged and never could be fully shut. The creatures too vary – twisted and corrupted forms of animals and people familiar to him: family dogs preternaturally swollen to twice their size with rotting coats of mange and slicked damp with dark liquids of decay. The people too were bloated vestiges of ones vaguely familiar to him but whose names escape him. Their eyes gorged wide with dark blood which streaked their mottled faces in crusted trails like lost rivers which hung from their chins swinging in ropy columns beneath paling yellowed teeth. To let them break through would mean death. This he knew with grave certainty. At the door was desperation and panic as their stench emanated forth, sickly and pungent like vomit and mold and ending in a gruesome exhalation like cancer, the stench sticky and clinging invading his nostrils and lungs never to be expunged. Then in the sudden waking he never knew if he repelled them or not.
By Kevin Rolly5 days ago in Horror
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